


Sushi and Snuffboxes

by Anti_kate



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Brief pieces, Demonic books, Ficlets, M/M, Obligatory Lockdown Fic, Pining, True Forms, lockdown - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:27:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24162817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anti_kate/pseuds/Anti_kate
Summary: A collection of ficlets and shorter pieces I’ve written for Good Omens.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 40
Kudos: 65
Collections: Name That Author Round One





	1. The Book

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for Curtaincall’s “Name The Author” challenge, the prompt for this was “six weeks after the apocalypse, Aziraphale brings Crowley a book”.

The oil-dark cover of the book on Crowley’s coffee table seemed to drink light. The faintly glimmering sigils on its spine were painful for any creature but a demon to read, and even for the denizens of hell, it wasn’t a nice experience. Reading enough of the language of hell would leave even Satan with bleeding eyeballs.

The sigils were Crowley’s name. Not Anthony J Crowley, nor Crawly, but his demonic name, the infernal syllables that Satan had uttered over him when he’d slithered from the burning sulphur pits.

Now, in Crowley’s flat, millennia later, Aziraphale did not look directly at the book. He looked around it, at the ceiling, out the window.

He also did not look directly at Crowley.

That was what made him sure the angel had read it. Not his bloodshot eyes, trembling hands, pale skin; those came from exposure to the book. But that Aziraphale wouldn’t, couldn’t even look at him made it clear he knew.

“Could you read it?” Crowley asked, gently, needing the angel to say it. Not did you read it.

“I could. It was in Sumerian.” Aziraphale gave a nervous little smile. “It’s been quite a while since I last read any Sumerian.”

“I’m sure it was thrilling.”

Aziraphale looked at him then. “I wouldn’t say that,” he said, softly, and Crowley’s withered heart shrank eve more. Here it was then, after six weeks of nice dinners, walks in the park, theatre tickets, and once, actual hand holding. The end of all that.

“No?”

“Rather sad, actually,” Aziraphale said to his own hands.

Sad. Yes. The full sad recounting of the horrifying deeds, not of the day, but of Crowley’s entire existence.

“Rather sad that they would consider this...” here Aziraphale looked at the book, just for a moment. “This litany of lies would change our relationship.”

“Lies?” Crowley said, barely able to hear anything over the rushing of his own blood.

“Utter falsehoods. Crowley. They gave you a commendation for the Spanish Inquisition. I know you had nothing to do with that.”

“Right,” Crowley said, trying not to let out a hiss. “But ... some of it is true.”

Aziraphale was now looking at him directly. “Of course. But you were just doing your job. Just as I was just doing my job at Sodom and Gomorrah. Just as I was just doing my job when I watched as they crucified that boy. Just as I did my job when during plague. When I didn’t help any of the poor souls in any of the wars.”

Crowley bit down on his response.

“I know what you are,” Aziraphale continued. “But I also know who you are. And I know you didn’t do it out of malice, or pleasure. You were doing what you had to do.”

Crowley didn’t say anything, he couldn’t speak, his mouth was full of glass.

“And now I know everything you did, and it changes nothing.”


	2. If At First You Don’t Succeed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The obligatory lockdown fic! _Invite him over, you bastard._

Aziraphale hung up the phone and looked at the piles of cake on his table. He really hadn’t expected Crowley to give up so easily. He decided to bake a dark chocolate torte and call Crowley back when it was done.

When the torte was finally cooling and the dishes miracled clean, he picked up the receiver of the Bakelite phone once more.

“Yes?” Crowley snapped down the line. “What now?”

“I was just calling to ask if you ... ah... have watched any good shows on the television lately.”

“What?”

“Well I was thinking if you were so transcendentally bored you could tell me about one of them.”

And so they spent a relaxing two hours talking about Tiger King, which Aziraphale could barely follow at all, but at least it kept Crowley chatting.

“Why don’t I come over and we can watch it together?” Crowley finally said.

“Oh no, my dear boy, that would be most against the rules,” Aziraphale said, setting out a second plate with a cake fork.

“Fine,” Crowley grumbled. “See you in August then, Angel.”

And he hung up once more.

Aziraphale pinched his nose. Crowley was being excessively dense. Perhaps isolation was eroding his mental facilities?

He decided to wait a whole 24 hours to call him again, during which time he baked an entire croquembouche and re-shelved his collection of magical realism from Borges to Carpentier to Murakami. (He wasn’t entirely sure if the Murakami belonged, but he talked himself into it.)

Finally, he took up the phone once again, and Crowley answered with a sleepy rumble on the second ring.

“Good morning my dear!”

“Angel it’s... 7pm...”

“Good evening then. Were you asleep?”

“Told you I was going to nap until this was all over.”

“Oh yes, that’s right.”

There was a pause. “Is there something you wanted, angel, or...”

“I do have a rather tragic problem, I’ve completely run out of wine” Aziraphale lied, not letting his eyes linger on the several cases he could see from where he stood.

“There’s an off license literally across the road from you, Aziraphale,” Crowley said.

“But isn’t that against the rules?”

“Nah the supply of booze is an essential service, apparently.”

“Of course, yes, silly me. I suppose I’ll just pop over there then.”

“I do have that case here,” Crowley said. “I can head over.”

“We mustn’t break the rules whenever we feel like!” Aziraphale said, hoping this time Crowley would get the bloody hint.

“Yes, yes, you’re right. I’m going back to sleep.”

“Wait!” Aziraphale almost shouted in his frustration. “You’re a demon Crowley, you’re supposed to break the rules.”

There was another silence, and Aziraphale could hear the sound of rustling, as if Crowley was moving around on his black sheets. (Not that Aziraphale knew his sheets were black, he’d just assumed they were across the course of many elaborate fantasies.)

“You’re telling me I shouldn’t come over, because it’s against the rules, but I’m a demon and I break rules,” Crowley said, slowly.

“Quite. I can’t say what you’re going to do next, because you’re so wily and anti-authoritarian,” Aziraphale agreed, a little breathlessly. “You’re a fiendishly cunning rule breaker. Why would a little isolation stop you from doing whatever you wanted?”

The next moment of silence took on a considering air. “I’ll be... right over then,” Crowley finally said.

“Perfect,” Aziraphale said. “I mean, how dare you.”

And then he hung up and waited for the door of the shop to open for the first time in weeks.


	3. Fade In

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little Aziraphale POV companion piece to RacketGhost’s _Closed Set._

He goes into to the other room to call the Chinese restaurant, to order xian long bao and biang biang noodles and pork floss. Some vegetables, too, steamed and then tossed in oyster sauce. Humans need vegetables or else they contract rickets and scurvy and possibly scrofula. He isn’t sure about that last, but it’s something to do with vitamins.

It won’t make things weird. Crowley had almost seemed as if he was begging, when he said that, and Aziraphale had promised, and now he had to keep his promise. He would order food, and make Crowley eat, and let him drink a little (not too much) wine, and insist he sleep.

I won’t let this change things, he thinks, hands on the old rotary phone, finger poised above the numbers. I won’t.

But it would, he knew that, on some level down below his cells, down into the very subatomic structure of protons and neutrons, down into the essence of his angelic self, where he was vast and bright, that it would. Not so much the sex, not that, or at least not that alone. That might have changed things enough, had it been under different, less fraught circumstances.

But it wouldn’t be happening, under less fraught circumstances. Under less fraught circumstances,Crowley’s taste would not linger on his tongue. Under less fraught circumstances, they’d be off having dinner somewhere, getting drunk, and then Aziraphale would come home alone.

It wasn’t just the sex.

No, that was transcendent but messy and human. (And the way Crowley’s mouth had taken him was a psalm to the pleasure of being human that Aziraphale had never thought he might know but had thought of, so many times, had buried deep in himself for centuries, only revealed in the rubble of a bombed out church.)

What it was, instead, that would change things, was that Crowley so clearly didn’t want it. Didn’t want him. That it was happening at all, at the behest of hell, with Crowley so reluctant that his own body rebelled against it, was an abomination.

 _I love you,_ he wants to say to Crowley, _I love you and you are dying, and I will not let you die. I will not let you go. I will walk into hell again, and again, and again, every day for eternity. There is nothing you cannot ask of me now that I will not give._

Still. It felt less like love, and more like a violation. More like some sort of terrible joke at his expensive, when Crowley had shuddered at his touch. When Crowley had flinched when his hand had skimmed over his soft cock. When Crowley had snapped at him to leave his clothes on, face hard and unreachable. Yes, a wretched joke. That the thing so longed for would be in reach, but only in a form so twisted as to be unrecognisable.

His own hands on the old Bakelite telephone seem unfamiliar, as if they belong to some other body. Blunt fingers, pale hair on broad knuckles. Hands he had skimmed over Crowley’s body. How does a demon like to be worshipped, he’d asked, with his mouth and his tongue and with his hands, and Crowley had responded with ... shock. Reluctance. Something like horror. 

He orders the Chinese food, and goes back into the other room. Crowley is still sitting on the couch, head thrown back, glaring balefully at the ceiling, pointedly ignoring the camera in the camera.

“I’ve got a nice white we can have,” he says, lightly, carefully. “Not too much though.”

“Leave off, angel,” Crowley says, but there’s no bite to it.

“I shall not,” Aziraphale replies, and at least this feels normal. Close to, anyway. “You need to eat, and drink water, and rest.”

He aches to reach out and stroke his hair, to fold him into his arms, to tell him that Aziraphale won’t let hell have him, but instead he goes for the wine glasses.

He doesn’t want anything to change. But it’s already late.


	4. Hunger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt: “I hope this doesn’t awaken something in me.” Inspired in part by Alt-J’s _Hunger of the Pine._

Evening has drawn in around the forest camp, close and dark. A man directs him to the Black Knight’s pavilion, emblazoned with his coat of arms: a red serpent knotted around itself upon a sable field.

He does not bother to announce his arrival, simply lifts the flap and goes to step inside, but stops still on the threshold. Within, Crowley stands in the glow of firelight from from a brazier, mid-undressing, his armour already on a stand beside him. He is stripped to the waist, clad only in slim black trousers that sit low on his hips.

He is too thin, Aziraphale thinks first, all sinew and sharpness; shoulder blades, ribs, the joints of his spine, all too prominent beneath his skin.

There are red marks on his body from his armour, striped across his shoulders and arms. Bruises, too. Battle has been unavoidable for them both. His hair is darkened with sweat, tied with a strip of leather against his neck.

Too thin, but still beautiful.

His skin is darker than Aziraphale’s own. It seems almost bronzed, burnished in the flickering light, and he is freckled from neck to hip.

Aziraphale should make some sound, alert him, but instead he cannot move, his hand still clutching the canvas. Something that half-awoke that day in Rome now stirs into full awareness. It opens a multitude of eyes, unfurls its wings, and hungers.

It is a bare moment, but it is forever.

Aziraphale traces the line of Crowley’s long spine it with his eyes. Just above the slight curve of his backside are two divots in Crowley’s flesh, and Aziraphale cannot help but imagine how it would feel to press his thumbs into them, to span his hands across Crowley’s narrow hips. To tip him forward into the pile of furs in the room’s corner, to have him laid out like that.

A revelation.

He would hold Crowley down and guide himself into the demon’s body, press his aching hardness against where Crowley would be soft and yielding, ease into him. He cannot stop himself from picturing it, the stretch of Crowley’s body around his cock. He imagines Crowley urging him deeper, pushing back greedily, golden eyes flashing at him over one shoulder, begging him to fuck him harder. He’d be so tight and hot, nothing at all like the way Aziraphale’s own fist feels in his own cold room.

No, Crowley would be perfect. He would gasp and shudder under Aziraphale’s touch, and Aziraphale would clutch those perfect sharp hips and drive into him again and again until they were both undone. He is an angel, he does not need to sleep, to eat, he could embrace Crowley until the universe turns to dust.

Crowley’s head turns, suddenly, and Aziraphale is the one laid bare.

“So,” Crowley says, low and soft. “Are you coming in or not, angel?”

Aziraphale hesitates for a heartbeat, then steps in, and lets the canvas fall behind him.


	5. Haiku (awakening)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What if I did a 5+1 as haiku?

A haiku 5+1

1\. Apple

The first bite of flesh

Red and perfect, oh to be

In your pink wet mouth

2\. Sword

In a dream you are

The flaming blade at my throat

Burn me with your grace

3\. Snake

Sliding and stroking

Ten thousand muscles caress

Scales against skin

4\. Fast

When I say too fast

I want you to persuade me,

The thrill of the chase

5\. Book

Lick your finger, turn

My pages, read my letters

They spell out your name

+1. You

You did not wake me

I was just waiting for 

The world made new

Bonus round: Cake

If I had to choose

Between Victoria Sponge

And you, you might win


	6. On The Nature of Angelic Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The prompt for this was “wallpaper”. Obviously.

“Go on then,” Crowley said, slurring drunkenly. He lying on his back on the floor, which made drinking hard, but stopped the room from spinning quite so much. 

“Go on what?” Aziraphale said. He was soft and relaxed in his chair, leaning almost as much as Crowley usually did.

“Show me the. Angelic. Wossname. The bit with the. Flaming wheels. Wings and eyeballs. You were just saying about religious visitations and showing your true angelic... bits, and how it made Joan of Arc cry. And then I thought. Never seen your angelic bits.”

“Never seen my angelic bits?” Aziraphale repeated.

“Essence,” Crowley tried to explain, but words were hard. All he knew was that he desperately wanted to  _ see _ Aziraphale. “Self. Angel self.”

“Oh no Crowley. That’s... no. Bad idea. Anyway you were an angel. You  _ know.” _

Crowley barely remembered that, beyond a sense memory of his own vastness, of stardust staining his wings.

“Come on. Angel. Just once,” he said, rolling onto his side so he could take an awkward slurp of his wine. “Hit me with that...divinity.”

Aziraphale regarded him with pursed lips, then gave a huff. “I haven’t done it in ages. Might be a bit rusty.”

Crowley waved a hand to indicate the unimportance of finesse. Aziraphale stood up, wobbling a little. He straightened his bow tie, and changed. 

At first it was a glow in Aziraphale’s human shape, a subtle effervescence, the impression of feathers and eyes. Then came the taste of sunshine and the smell of hydrogen, and a low deep sound like a vast bell. He couldn’t see Aziraphale any more, only a brightness so bright it was physically painful, and yet the coruscating luminescence kept growing.

He opened his mouth to beg Aziraphale to stop but the sound was whipped away by the angel’s light and grace, the blazing love that shone from him. It coursed through Crowley in an endless stream of nuclear radiance. He was drowning it in, aflame in it, every part of him on fire, and he was silently screaming, because this  _ love _ was a fire that even a demon couldn’t withstand—

Darkness rolled across the room.

Crowley gasped. He blinked away the after-images seared into his retinas. A worried face entered his field of vision, soft and gentle, not a single trace of perfect burning grace visible. 

The room was a singed mess, the furniture charred lumps on the floor. The glass in Crowley’s hand had fused into something vaguely squid-like. What had once been a lamp was something horrific and melted. The walls were black.

Miraculously, the bookshelf was unharmed.

Crowley felt a hand on his arm. 

“Are you all right there, dearest?” Aziraphale asked, anxiously. “I may have overdone it.”

“Gosh. You think?” Crowley got out. His mouth tasted of ash and time, but he managed to push himself into a sitting position. 

Aziraphale backed away with little laugh, his gaze surveying the room. “Oh well, I hated that wallpaper anyway.”


End file.
